Trippin

Over the years the kids have gotten pretty good at car travel. We are in and out traveling all the time, and rarely do they complain. In the last few days we've made the short trip to and from Michigan several times ... and traffic every time. The other night I got caught in the downtown curfew limitations. A few days later it was just bad luck between construction and 2 accidents. Today we just mostly hit rush hour traffic, which was my own fault.

These recent traffic hiccups made me think back to March & April when we made a few trips back and forth during shelter-in-place, before "permanently" staying in Michigan. We'd drive at any time of the day and encounter only a handful of cars on our journey through three states. On one hand it's good to see trucks on the road, a sign of production and purchase. It's good to see cars because that often means employment. But it's also crazy to see this shift because nothing has actually changed regarding the state of the pandemic since March. Yet, if you look at the roads alone you'd assume we are all back to normal. That weird balance between normal and not-normal is really most of what is in my mind lately as Im supposed to return to the classroom in a week and 2/3 kids return to a classroom the week after. It's like nothing has changed while at the same time ... everything has changed.